Smart Materials And Sustainable Innovations

In the near future, innovation will either be sustainable, or it won't be!

To innovate, you will need to be sustainable. Therefore, future smart materials will need to be sustainable to be developed and used to build sustainable innovations.

Why will innovation soon be synonymous with sustainability?

The "time-to-market" of sustainability is taking place (i.e., when the demand for sustainable solutions becomes dominant in the market) due to increasing pressures regarding climate disasters and the impacts of pollution on living and working conditions. Stakeholders increasingly demand active participation in environmental protection and social responsibility, and traditional price competition models are becoming insufficient.

Therefore, the next generation of smart materials will have to be sustainable, and their role will be to create sustainable innovations.

Because of their disruptive and innovative characteristics, smart materials can easily enable the development of sustainable innovations.

What is a Smart Material?

A smart material can spontaneously modify its physical properties (structure, viscosity, absorption and/or emission spectrum, etc) in response to natural or induced excitations. These may come from outside or inside the material: variations in temperature, pH, humidity, mechanical stress, electric or magnetic fields, etc.

Unlike conventional materials, which are intrinsically inert, and whose properties always…